Please follow Brian's very good advice. Your computer has been "zombied",
or in other words, been infected with malware that sends out spams or
whatever for someone else's personal gain. You might also want to alert
your ISP to this so that if/when you are reported for spamming, your account
won't be automatically shut down on you. An ounce of prevention ... type of
thing.
It's highly likely that simply removing the file you've discovered will
stop it for long. There is a controlling program hidden somewhere that will
simply re-create the files it needs. Also there may be more than the one
file you discovered on your own.
Once a machine has become a zombie, it's basically under control of the
spammers. You WILL eventually be reported for spamming, and lose access to
your accounts if you don't get it stopped for good.
Don't feel bad; you're among a large number of people infected this way.
The best protection for the future is to install a firewall and malware
detectors. ZoneAlarm is a good firewall and it's free. Also easy to use.
At first it's a pain "allowing" accesses to happen, but you only have to
give permission for something one time; after that the program remembers
that particular event and won't ask you again. In a day or so you'll be all
set.
If this hasn't taken care of your questions, come on back and we'll try
again.
See a couple of inline comments below:
Good, but ... Norton only looks for certain things. To protect against
malware, you also need an arsenal of anti-malware tools like Adaware,
Sypbot, WinPatrol and so on. NO single program will catch all of them, but
together they make a pretty strong defense. ALWAYS update them often; new
exploits are discovered daily. I update mine before I run each one.
You could just delete it, but as I said above, there may be other files
hidden around the disk, and even registry entries that were made. You won't
be able to locate all the culprits, or maybe even no further culprits on
your own; that's where advice like Brian gave is the right path to follow.
You could try it from Safe Mode and, faling success there, go to the Command
Prompt to delete it. More than likely though you're going to need the
assistance of some malware to eradicate it completely.
When it's been removed from the computer it will no longer show up there.
Probably very small risks unless you remove a system file. The key word
there is "probably".
To get a reasonable protection level, you need, in addition to Norton, at
least three anti-spyware programs and a firewall such as ZA.
If you do seem to be able to fix this youself, then congrats. BUT ... keep
a close eye on things for the next few weeks. If your machine has been
compromised and turned itno a zombie, I suspect the following is true:
-- a spammer has access to your machine anytime you are online.
-- the malware you now have might either rebuild and reinstall itself
unbeknownst to you, or the spammer may even be checking the health of his
malware and making updates to it.
Brian's advice, malware detectors, and a firewall can seal that up. Let
me make that stronger: They WILL seal that up, unless you somehow
inadvertantly ask for the malware to be downloaded. Don't laugh; there are
some pretty smart folk out there who can make it sound good, but then,
besides what you think you're downloading, there's also a good payload of
malware that you neved even notice!
Some of these are old, but they're still relevant:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Is-Your-P...orld.com/article/id,50084-page,1/article.html
HTH
Pop`
